iTunes has a free Christmas album available. See this link. The song that I like the best is Auld Lange Syne by The Lonesome Traveler Band. It's a bluegrass version, but I think it is well done. I'm not sure whether the link will expire on Tuesday, as sometimes Apple only posts free songs for one week.
Google Scholar now has searchable legal opinions. They're not that comprehensive right now, but they have a primitive equivalent of Keyciting/Shephardizing.
Update:
Here's a link to Google's blog entry.
There is free admission to National Parks (and National Forests) on Veterans Day. See:
As a former high school cross country runner (and I remember we were only allowed to wear white T-shirts in addition to our uniforms), I can relate to this article. Someone in my high school wore a different colored hair band and was disqualified. While on the one hand, rules are rules, I'm not entirely sure what the point of the rule is. I mean, so long as one team isn't trying to disguise itself as another team, I don't see why there can't be a slight variation in uniforms.
According to this piece from the University of Florida, a hunch is worth listening to. One of my professors at law school said that if you were talking to a client and something seemed off, it probably was.
If you're on the Internet and don't want to wait to power up Acrobat reader, try Google Document Viewer on for size.
It can also create links for blogs. For example, IRS Publication 17.
Here is a good video on Time Dollar Youth Court, which one of my friends works at. See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqp8MzJzm4M
For anyone in the Maryland Outdoor Club reading this (or anyone else for that matter!), here's a link to a historical site on Skyline Drive. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, that's the road that traverses Shenandoah National Park. There's a picture on the National Park Service's website of what looks like the same overlook that I stopped at last fall and took pictures at. I'm looking forward to the fall.
I read an article in the Times on the Taconic Parkway the other day and agreed with many of the points made. The Taconic definitely requires attention when driving it. The lanes are thin, and there is not much space between the shoulder and the center guard rail. It's kind of like the section of the George Washington Memorial Parkway between I-395 and where it starts to climb up away from the Potomac.
Another thing to pay attention to on the Taconic Parkway is your speed. The New York State Police love that road.
Here is an update to my two posts on United Breaking Guitars. According to this blog post, the musician packed his guitar for transit in a soft case. Also, to protect themselves against future mishaps, United now makes you sign a waiver before you ship your guitar with them. While I agree it would have been nicer if they had been more careful with the guitar, Dave Carroll (the musician) did not help matters when he packed his guitar in a soft case.
For those of you DSLers out there reading, Penn State's libraries posted an article by Mark Podvia about the history of Dickinson's library. I liked, especially, the discussion of the tobacco chewers trying to aim for a hole in the floor.
There was an article in the Times (thanks Matt) about the future of the recording industry. The statement by the article about the amount of music that people are streaming instead of listening to online surprised me. I guess, with Myspace, and how it allows people to stream music, I should not find this that surprising. But, on the other hand, you can't listen to streamed music on an iPod.
What did not surprise me as much was how people hardly bought CDs anymore. I've bought a few CDs this year, but then, I think only from bands that I saw perform in person. I did this partially to support the band, because I figured I was cutting out middle men.
There are very few CDs that I've purchased (even from bands) where I've liked a lot of the songs on them. The two that I can think of right now are a promotional CD that was put out by a Newfoundland supermarket chain to celebrate the 500th anniversary of John Cabot discovering Newfoundland and Heroes by Paul Overstreet.
United donated $3,000 to the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz on behalf of David Carroll, who said they broke his instrument in transit. This article has more details, and also talks about the power of the Internet in getting a response from a company.
Here is a link to some summer reading ideas from the University of Texas at Austin.
A musician produced this video after he tried and failed to get United to reimburse him for a broken guitar.
As details continue to come out about Metro and its train problems, it's becoming clear to me that Metro is not careful enough with passenger safety.
This article says that Metro believes that the defect in the train circuitry would have been "impossible" to detect. I beg to differ. While perhaps someone staring at the screen might not notice something, one of the advantages of having a computer monitoring things is that you can use the computer to stare at the screen (or watch for strange things happening). What the computer should have been programmed to notice is a train suddenly disappearing. Even on Metro, trains don't mysteriously disappear. They move into the next signal block further down the line. If a train disappears without moving into the next signal block down the line, then that, to me, signifies a Problem. The computer should have been programmed to notice disappearing trains and report them.
BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) had the same problem. Rene posted to Twitter about this.
